Lunch

Lunch

The lunch facility for Computers and Writing 2007 wasn’t the best venue for Helen Liggett, but that didn’t stop it from being an interesting presentation. There was no amplification for her voice, and it was disconcerting to sense the mass of people leaving during the first portion of her talk. That said, it was my favorite event of the conference thus far.

Liggett argued for a new perception of street photographs as a performative activity whose worth lies in its “surplus of fact,” rather than their value as a hermetically sealed objects. She also explored the impact of various controls (such as lighting) on the value of photographs. The central organizing question was “what makes a photograph good”. Liggett suggested that both staged and unstaged photographs can be “good” for different reasons, and that the blurring of distinctions between staged/unstaged results in a continuum rather than a binary separation between them.

While I felt that the connection she suggested between urban environments and street photography was tenuous at best, her primary points were well taken. The presentation came at an opportune time, because I will be hitting the road again tomorrow. I really think the essential quality of “street” photography is indeed the street, not the city.